Ulysses
is probably the foreign novel which has had most influence
on Argentinean narrative fiction. At times it seems to
be as much ours as if it had been written in Argentina.
And in a way it was. Ulysses was published in Paris in
1922, and its odyssey through Argentinean literature began,
as might be expected, with Jorge Luis Borges. As early
as 1925 Borges boldly claimed ‘I am the first explorer
from the Hispanic world to make landfall on Joyce’s book’.
A year earlier he had attempted what may very well have
been the first Spanish version of the text, a translation,
in a heavily Buenos Aires dialect, of the final part of
Molly Bloom’s soliloquy.

In
his article ‘El Ulises de Joyce’ (Joyce’s Ulysses),
Borges said that he approached Ulysses with ‘the
vague intensity exhibited by ancient travellers upon discovering
a land new to their wandering surprise’. He was quick
to anticipate the question inevitably asked of everyone
who reads this endless novel: ‘Did you read it all?’ Borges
replied that he had not, but that even so he knew what
it was, just as one can know a city without having walked
down every one of its streets. More than just a caprice,
Borges’s response in fact represented a shrewd methodological
statement: Ulysses should be read as one might
walk through a city, making up an itinerary, sometimes
retracing one’s steps on the same streets and completely
ignoring others. Similarly, a writer cannot be influenced
by all of Ulysses, but rather by one or other
of its chapters, or one or other aspects of the book.

Borges
did not imitate Joyce’s styles and techniques, but the
young 25-year-old Borges was fascinated by the breadth
of the Joycean enterprise, the concept of a total book.
The book of sand, the library of Babel, the poem ‘La Tierra’
(The Earth) that Carlos Argentino Daneri tries to write
in ‘El Aleph’, all spring from Borges’s fascination with
Joyce’s novel. Like the total poems of Dante Alighieri
or Walt Whitman, or the Polyolbion of Michael
Drayton, they suggest the possibility of putting all
reality into one book. In his later years Borges continued
trying to deal with this book that most obsessed him.
‘Ulysses is a kind of microcosm, isn’t it? It
includes the entire world, although of course it’s pretty
long, and I don’t think anyone has read it all. A lot
of people have analysed it. But as to reading it in its
entirety from beginning to end, I don’t know if anyone
has done it’, he said in one of his conversations with
Osvaldo Ferrari.

What
is fundamental in Borges, especially when he dealt with
infinite dimensions such as the universe or eternity,
is to condense. He worked through metaphor and metonymy,
never by piling up detail. In Ulysses, Joyce
expanded the events of one day into 700 pages, in ‘El
inmortal’ (The Immortal), Borges compressed 2,800 years
into ten. Faced with the ambition of Daneri, ‘Borges’
(the Borges character in ‘El Aleph’) sums up Aleph in
a paragraph that suggests both the vastness of the Aleph
and the impossibility of putting it into words. Joyce,
on the other hand, might have worked like Daneri, though
with more talent. ‘His unceasing examination of the tiniest
minutiae of consciousness obliged Joyce to overcome the
fleetingness of time with a calming gesture, as opposed
to the frenzy with which English drama encapsulated a
hero’s entire life into a few crowded hours. If Shakespeare
– according to his own metaphor – put the deeds of ages
into one revolution of a sand-dial, Joyce inverted the
process, and the single day of his hero unfolds into the
many days of his readers’, Borges comments in the essay
referred above.

Joyce
and Borges had styles that were almost opposite - if we
can even talk about one style in the case of
Joyce. Borges catalogued these styles in his Evaristo
Carriego. There was the ‘reality style’ appropriate
to a novel, exact, all-consuming, the Joycean style par
excellence. And there was the style that Borges cultivated,
that of ‘remembrance’, tending towards simplification
and economy of language and event. ‘Night appeals to us
because it suppresses irrelevant details, just like memory’,
he adds in his poem ‘Nueva refutación del tiempo’ (New
Refutation of Time), while ‘La noche que en el sur lo
velaron’ (The Night that they kept Vigil in the South)
contains the line ‘night, which frees us from our greatest
grief, the prolixity of reality.’ What Borges calls the
‘reality style’ is of course the perception style, which
defines the aesthetics of realist fiction and reaches
its apogee in the nouveau roman. Contrasting
with the systematic and articulate description created
by someone from the model set before him, memory is essentially
‘holding onto isolated elements’. In this context, forgetting
is not the opposite of remembering, but rather its fundamental
creative mechanism. Except, of course, if one is Funes,
whose memory holds no forgetfulness and would thus be
incapable of writing stories. Or Marcel Proust, for whom
memories are more vivid and detailed and intense than
what he sees in front of him. ‘Funes el Memorioso’ (Funes,
the Memorious) can in fact be read as Borges’s joke on
Proust (a writer in whom, unlike most of his contemporaries,
Borges had little interest).

What
brings Borges and Joyce together is their literary setting.
Both writers were from marginalised Western countries,
colonial or neocolonial. Out of that limitation they were
able to create literature which encompassed all culture,
both their own and that of the colonial master, even refining
the language of that master. Joyce taught the English
how to write in English, Borges did the same for the Spanish.

While
Borges may partly be defined as the first reader of Ulysses,
Roberto Arlt defines himself as the one who could not
read it. In 1931, in the preface to his novel Los
lanzallamas (The Flame Thrower), he wrote angrily:
‘On the other hand, some people are scandalised by the
brutality with which I described certain perfectly natural
situations in the relations between the sexes. Those same
society pages have spoken of Joyce, rolling their eyes.
This springs from the spiritual delight occasioned by
a certain character in Ulysses, a man who eats
shall we say an aromatic breakfast in his toilet, sniffing
the stink of what he has just defecated. But James Joyce
is English. James Joyce has not been translated into Spanish,
and it is considered good taste to speak of him. The day
that James Joyce becomes available to all, the society
pages will invent a new idol, who will be read by no more
than a half-dozen of the initiated’.

There
was a happy time when the choice between Borges and Arlt
was put forward as the Scylla and Charybdis of Argentinean
literature. (Lately, with even less success, there has
been an effort to replace this with the choice between
Borges and Walsh.) It is certainly clear that between
1925 and 1931 Ulysses divided the literary world:
there were those who could read it and those who could
not. ‘I am the first person to read Ulysses’
boasted Borges. ‘I’ll be the last to read Ulysses,’
declared Arlt just as proudly ‘and that makes me who I
am.’ In the words of Renzi, a character in the novel Respiración
artificial (Artificial Respiration) by Ricardo Piglia:
‘Arlt gets away from the tradition of bilingualism. Arlt
is outside of it, he reads translations’. If throughout
the nineteenth century and even as late as Borges, we
see the paradox of a national literature that is built
out of the split between Spanish and the language in which
it is read, which is always a foreign language, ‘Arlt
does not undergo this split […] He is in contrast the
first to defend reading translations. Take a look at what
he says about Joyce in the prologue to Los Lanzallamas
and you’ll see’.

Early
on it was said, and it continues to be said, that even
with three versions of the book now in Spanish, Ulysses
is literally untranslatable. Perhaps for that reason several
authors in different parts of the world - Alfred Döblin
with Berlin Alexanderplatz, Luis Martín-Santos
with Tiempo de silencio (Time of Silence), Virginia
Woolf with Mrs. Dalloway, the female Ulysses
- took on the task of rewriting it by setting the action
in their own worlds, a kind of radical translation. Leopoldo
Marechal, in his Adán Buenosayres, took on the ambitious
task of writing the Argentine Ulysses. Adán
Buenosayres follows Joyce’s Ulysses in minute
and highly planned detail. Its systematic use of Homeric
parallels towards the end (in “Viaje a la oscura ciudad
de Cacodelphia”(Voyage to the Dark City of Cacodelphia))
gives way to echoes of Dante. Borges always expressed
surprise at critics’ enthusiasm for the Homeric parallels
in Ulysses, and used his short story ‘Pierre
Menard, autor del Quijote’ (Pierre Menard, author of Quixote)
to poke fun at them indirectly: ‘One of those parasitical
books that put Christ on a boulevard somewhere, Hamlet
on the Cannebière in Marseilles or Don Quixote on Wall
Street’. This aspect was of special interest to Marechal,
and in his work at some length appear the shield of Achilles,
Polyphemus, Circe, the Sirens and the descent to hell.
He also shares with Joyce the ambition of recapturing
the epic tradition for the novel. The confessed Catholic
Marechal seeks to rediscover the epic spirit,
while the renegade Catholic Joyce, enemy of any philosophy
that would distance us from earthly life in all its richness,
would have been fascinated by what Marechal in his ‘James
Joyce y su gran aventura novelística’ (James Joyce and
his Great Novelistic Adventure), called ‘the demon of
the letter’. ‘Joyce concludes by giving prominence to
the means of expression, to such an extent that the continual
interchange of resources and the free play of words make
us lose sight of the scene and characters. It does not
stop there, because there is a “demon of the letter” and
it is a fearsome devil. To judge by his last work, the
demon of the letter completely took over Joyce.’

Though
begun in the early 1930s, Adán Buenosayres was
not published till 1948. Three years earlier the moment
foretold by Arlt had arrived - in 1945, scarcely three
years after his death, the first translation of Ulysses
into Spanish was published. This appeared in Argentina
and the translator was the relatively unknown J. Salas
Subirat. This translation was followed by two more, both
carried out in Spain. The Argentinean version undoubtedly
has the most errors, but it also has many fine elements,
and when we consider that the Argentinean had no access
to the vast critical apparatus that his successors were
able to avail of, his achievements can be considered to
be of epic proportions. Further, they are a melancholy
reminder of an era when Buenos Aires could be considered
capital of Hispanic culture.

Many
Latin American novelists of the 1960s took William Faulkner
as a model. This was at least partly because Faulkner,
like so many of them, belonged to the Caribbean, while
the Faulknerian formula of combining a regionalist and
rural literature with the latest modernist techniques
is in fact the formula of the Latin American literary
boom, from Mexico to Uruguay. In the case of Argentina,
however, literature in the twentieth century moves definitively
from country to city, moreover to a cosmopolitan city
and one marked by European immigration. Joyce, who took
on single-handed the task of getting rid of Irish pastoralism
– the literature of the ‘Celtic Revival’ of Yeats and
his followers – and putting in its stead a modern and
urban literature, has for that reason been our model,
rather than Faulkner. The rural towns of inland Argentina,
especially those parts of the pampas where there was large-scale
foreign settlement, are those most commonly depicted in
our fiction (Rodolfo Walsh, Manuel Puig, Haroldo Conti,
Osvaldo Soriano, César Aira) and they can be characterised
more by their aspirations to the culture of Buenos Aires
than by their own traditional culture. An example of this
is the town of Coronel Vallejos in the work of Puig.

Puig
confessed that he had never read Ulysses in full,
feeling that it was enough to know that each of its chapters
is written in its own style, technique and language. Already
in his first novel, La traición de Rita Hayworth (Betrayed
by Rita Hayworth), some chapters are purely in dialogue,
others in interior monologue, and still others in what
might be termed low styles such as the letter, school
composition, young girls’ intimate diaries, anonymous
writing. Boquitas pintadas (Painted Lips)
seems to spring from the pop chapter of Ulysses,
‘Nausicaa’ (a teenage girl’s interior monologue, her sensibility,
soul and language formed from women’s magazines, and The
Buenos Aires Affair is the most consistently Joycean
of all. If Borges adopted the cultured or postmodern aspect
of Joyce, it was Puig who saw the way the postmodern wind
was blowing, with its camp and pop, even kitsch, and its
mass culture, so alien to Borges.

The
work of Rodolfo Walsh, which, in simplistic readings,
even today in vogue, is seen only in terms of social activism
and critique, always exhibits the presence of Joyce. Of
an Irish family, in a country in which that community
has fiercely maintained its cohesiveness through language,
religion and tradition, and educated like Joyce in an
Irish Catholic boarding-school, Walsh did not escape the
influence of his quasi-compatriot, though in his case
it was Dubliners and especially A Portrait
of the Artist that left their mark on his ‘Irish
Stories’. Like Borges, Walsh tended towards the laconic,
and the prolixity of Ulysses may have seemed foreign,
even hostile to him. Nevertheless, his pampas stories,
such as ‘Cartas’ (Letters) and ‘Fotos’
(Photos) constitute - as Ricardo Piglia astutely pointed
out -, little Joycean universes, a condensed rustic Ulysses.

His
‘Irish Stories’ have an autobiographical basis. When Miguel
Walsh, a farm foreman who had taken the risk of trying
to become an independent landowner, lost all during the
notorious decade of the 1930s, two of his children, Rodolfo
and Héctor, were sent to a boarding-school run by nuns
in Capilla del Señor, Buenos Aires Province, and subsequently
to the Instituto Fahy in Moreno. Both of these schools
served the Irish community. ‘It is true that they are
different to the others,’ said Walsh in an interview.
‘Clearly if we want to describe the tendency in writing
style towards the widened use of words, that is to say
a widening of the resources, we might call it epic in
the sense that the stories and method are very small while
the language is grandiose, and you can use this grandiloquent
language for boys’ stories that I would never use even
if I were writing an epic.’ The formula inverts that of
Joyce: a scrupulously everyday language used for epic
themes, an epic language used for minor stories, or, one
might say, stories about minors. In the same interview
Walsh admits that there is a Joycean influence in his
Irish stories, although he claims that this is more in
theme than in style. The atmosphere of these stories reminds
us of the first chapter of the Portrait, though
with one fundamental difference. Clongowes is a boarding-school
for rich children, while the Instituto Fahy is for the
poor. What follows from this is that for the Walsh family,
the father’s ruin prompted entry into the boarding-school,
while for Joyce, it forced exit from such a school. Joyce,
for his part, focuses principally on the indelible mark
that a Jesuit education can leave on a young man’s soul,
his own. Walsh on the other hand is concerned with the
boarding -chool as a whole, and is more worried about
the emotional and physical damage that he suffered.

Joyce,
who became a writer once he had cast off the two yokes
of the Catholic Church and the duty to serve the Irish
revolution, is hostile to any idea of ideological or political
engagement. His work does not exclude the political (in
fact it is steeped in politics—the short story ‘Ivy Day
in the Committee Room’, the Christmas dinner scene in
The Portrait, and throughout both Ulysses
and Finnegans Wake). Yet that is all he does
— he includes it. The mission of literature is nothing
less than to ‘forge the uncreated conscience of my race’
and thus politics and religion are subordinate to it.
In Chapter 5 of The Portrait, Stephen Dedalus
puts forward his aesthetic theory: ‘I mean that the tragic
emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is.
The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire
or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something;
loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These
are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographic
or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic
emotion is therefore static. The mind is arrested and
raised above desire and loathing’.

Walsh’s
reply appears in his story entitled ‘Fotos’:

Things
to say to M:

The
aesthetic is ecstatic.

Integritas.
Consonantia. Claritas.

Aristotle.
Croce. Joyce.

Mauricio:

To
hell with Croce.

No,
my friend, now I get it. Art is for you people.

If anyone could do it, it would no longer be art’.

Jacinto
Tolosa is the first to speak. He is a rancher’s son and
aspires to be a poet and a lawyer. Mauricio, his friend,
is outgoing and friendly, a lazy son of a businessman,
a passionate but unsure photographer. Jacinto is using
Joyce to convince Mauricio that photography is not art.
It is tempting to establish a parallel between Tolosa’s
view (photography is not art) and the view that would
condemn Walsh’s documentary work (those verbal snapshots
of reality) to a secondary aesthetic level. ‘Fotos’ is,
among other things, a defence of the artistic validity
of non-fiction, of forms such as testimonial or documentary
art. Walsh had a clear vision of the implications of Joycean
aesthetics: the aesthetic experience is sufficient in
itself, there is no need to justify it by invoking its
supposed usefulness to individual or society. The kinetic
arts – didactic, moralising, political or pornographic
– impose a certain line of conduct, they take us outside
the work, towards some form of action – revolution, perhaps,
or masturbation. For Joyce, literature modifies – creates
– consciousness, it shapes the soul. It is so profoundly
political that it cannot be subordinated to politics.
Compromise is antithetical to art. William Butler Yeats
wished to write poems fit to accompany men to the gallows,
Joyce wrote stories and novels to immunise men against
the foolish temptation to ascend the gallows’ steps.

In
Juan José Saer, Joyce’s influence at first glance seems
less obvious, except perhaps in his novel El Limonero
Real (The Royal Lemon Tree). Yet his particular
style results from the conjunction of the flood of words
in Faulkner’s stories (he was in essence a disciple of
Joyce) with a fondness for the minute French objectivism
of Alain Robbe-Grillet and others. It is worth mentioning
that French objectivism is evident in Chapter 17 of Ulysses,
‘Ithaca’. Saer's interest in Ulysses is in any
case evident in his critical articles, for example the
one entitled ‘J. Salas Subirat’ published in Trabajos
(Works):

J.
Salas Subirat’s Ulysses (the imprecise initial
lent his name a rather mysterious air) kept coming up
in conversations, and his countless verbal inventions
were interwoven in them without any need to be explained.
Anyone between 18 and 30 who aspired to be a writer
in Santa Fe, Paraná, Rosario or Buenos Aires knew them
by heart and was able to quote them. Many writers of
the generation of the 50s or 60s learned some of their
narrative resources and techniques in translation. The
reason is very simple. The turbulent river of Joyce’s
prose when translated by someone from Buenos Aires dragged
with it the living speech that no other author - with
the possible exception of Roberto Arlt - had been able
to use with such inventiveness and freedom and clarity.
The lesson from that work is clear. Everyday language
provides the energy that fertilises the most universal
literature.’

Joyce
finished the task begun, among others, by Gustave Flaubert
and Henry James, those who wiped out the traditional nineteenth
century novel and heralded modernism in its place: to
have done with the omniscient and personalised narrator,
the spokesman for an author who in G. K. Chesterton’s
critique of Thomas Hardy, ‘personified the universe in
order to give it a piece of his mind’; to abandon stylistic
unity within books and between an author’s books, to multiply
points of view. Faced with all this variation, Joyce chooses
one fixed point: the terrain. Dublin is the scene of all
his fiction, the same people reappear in different novels
and short stories, their stories go on from book to book.
Once this foundation is established, all else fluctuates.
Dublin is a very real city in the early chapters of Ulysses,
in Chapter 15, (‘Circe’) it is a city of dreams (not to
mention Finnegans Wake), in Chapter 14 (‘The
Oxen of the Sun’) it is different cities at different
times. Faulkner was the first to learn from this: keep
the territory, but vary the language, the style, the timeframe,
the levels of fictive reality. However, unlike Faulkner
and his fictional Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha, Joyce opted
for a real city, and did so to the fullest: ‘If the city
one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be
reconstructed out of my book’. And he was right. In its
representation of Dublin, Ulysses is not just
realist, but real. If Joyce places a certain house, business,
or tree in his city of paper, it is because that is where
it stood in the city of bricks and stone. Aside from his
extraordinary memory, Joyce spent his time writing to
relatives and friends to confirm the accuracy of his descriptions.
In Chapter 10 (‘The Wandering Rocks’), we follow several
characters in their wanderings though the city. Readers
who took the time to follow the trajectories in the book
have shown that its timeframes coincide precisely with
those of real life. (Joyce wrote this chapter with the
aid of a map of Dublin and a stopwatch). It is thus surprising
to realise that Joyce carried out this minute verbal reconstruction
of Dublin from exile, without even once returning. Surprising,
that is, from the practical point of view. From the emotional
point of view, however, it is perfectly logical, for one
only reconstructs so obsessively what one has lost for
ever. Joyce’s Dublin in this respect is like Guillermo
Cabrera Infante’s Havana, perhaps the most Joycean of
Latin American writers. His novels Tres tristes tigres
(Three Sad Tigers) and La Habana para un Infante Difunto
(Havana for a Dead Prince) are, like Ulysses,
detailed pictures of a beloved city that has been lost
forever. The difference is that Joyce did not want to
go back, while Cabrera Infante could not.

The
choices made by Joyce and Faulkner determined those of
their Latin American followers. Mario Vargas Llosa and
Juan José Saer founded literary territories in real cities,
such as Lima and Santa Fe. Juan Carlos Onetti, Gabriel
García Márquez and Manuel Puig did the same with fictional
lands: Santa María, Macondo and Coronel Vallejos. The
novel Respiración artificial, by Ricardo Piglia,
is a fictional essay in the style of some of Borges’s
short stories, such as ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’
or ‘Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain’ ('An Examination
of the Work of Herbert Quain'). It includes multiple reference
to, and reflections about, the work of Joyce. All the
authors we have mentioned selectively draw on Joyce. They
adopt some of his techniques (Marechal, Puig), some part
of his referential universe (Walsh), or they write about
Joyce himself in their work (Borges). Piglia tries to
do all of this at the same time. He uses three Joycean
techniques, stylistic parody, quotation and cryptic allusion,
and applies them to Joycean themes and texts. The ‘Joycean
material’ of Respiración artificial opens precisely
with a comment on the omnipresence of parody: ‘There are
no more adventures, just parodies. […] Where there used
to be action, experience, passion, today there are just
parodies. I tried to tell Marcelo this in my letters,
that parody has taken over from history. Isn’t parody
the very negation of history? […] He [Joyce] would I think
have accepted his idea that only parody exists (because
really, what was he but a parody of Shakespeare?).’ These
words are from Tardewski, a Polish intellectual who remained
stuck in Argentina – it is not hard to see in him a fictional
version of Witold Gombrowicz, who knew Joyce in Zurich.
Tardewski then asks: ‘Do you like his work -Joyce’s work?’
‘I don’t think there’s another writer in this century’,
replies Renzi. ‘Okay,’ responds Tardewski, ‘but don’t
you think he was a little too realist?’ To which Renzi
replies: ‘Basically, […] Joyce dealt with one problem:
How to narrate real events.’

A
line further down, Renzi goes out to buy cigarettes, and
in the bar listens to a story told in colloquial language,
about a man who murdered five of his brothers by sticking
a needle into their throats. Much later, near the end
of the novel, Tardewski decides to answer Renzi back,
commencing a polemic that might well be titled ‘Franz
Kafka or James Joyce?’:

I do not share your enthusiasm for James Joyce. How
can you compare the two? Joyce […] is too … how can
I put it?... hard-working. An acrobat. Someone who performs
sleights of words the way others perform sleights of
hand. Kafka, on the other hand, is the tightrope walker,
with no net […] Joyce carries a placard that says “I
overcome all obstacles” while Kafka writes in a notebook
and keeps this inscription in his jacket pocket: All
obstacles overcome me. […] Better to keep quiet than
speak about the unspeakable, as Wittgenstein put it.
How can one speak about the unspeakable? That is the
question that Kafka tried to answer. […] What would
we say is unspeakable today? The world of Auschwitz.
That world is beyond language, it is the frontier bound
by the barbed wire of language. […] Wittgenstein saw
clearly that that the only work that might match his
own was the fragmented work of the incomparable Franz
Kafka. Joyce? He sought to awake from the nightmare
of history in order to perform pretty acrobatics with
words. Kafka, in contrast, awoke every day to enter
that nightmare and write about it.

Piglia,
it must be pointed out, speaks not just about but indeed
from the other side of the wire: his novel was written
and published in an Argentina that had been turned into
a concentration camp by the last military dictatorship.
In this context, the quote from the famous closing passage
of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus acquires
a second meaning, though without losing its primary meaning:
‘What we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence’,
a sentence that may be linked to another posted by the
military dictatorship on the Obelisk, the symbolic centre
of Buenos Aires: ‘SILENCE IS HEALTH’.

What
appears to be at issue in the Renzi-Tardewski polemic
is not the relative merits of Joyce or Kafka, but the
relevance of any poetry, if indeed it is a case of ‘writing
poetry after Auschwitz’. The Pole Tardewski lauds Kafka,
and Respiración artificial seems to give him
the last word against his antagonist Renzi. Yet the author
seems closer to his alter-ego Renzi, since both Respiración
artificial as well as his subsequent novel, La
ciudad ausente (The Absent City), are both
closer to Joyce’s loudness than to Kafka’s inaudible murmur.
This is exemplified by such things as the hyperliterary
and often cryptic character of both books, their heterogeneous
and fragmented textualities, their systematic use of allusion
and parody, not to mention the long section dedicated
to Finnegans Wake, and the inclusion of the character
Lucia Joyce in La ciudad ausente. For to speak
of that which cannot be spoken, of the Argentinean terror
in this case, Joyce could have been at least as effective
as the more predictable Kafka. This is shown not just
in the two novels of Piglia but also in the work of his
contemporary Luis Gusmán, who in En el corazón de
junio (In the Heart of June) explores the
subtle, perhaps imaginary links between the most famous
16 June in Irish literature, Bloomsday, and the
most famous in Argentine history, Bombsday, 16
June 1955. He follows the steps of, among others, the
Italian-Argentine writer J. R. Wilcock, who translated
fragments of Finnegans Wake into Italian. A later
foreign novel resorted to Kafka to tell the story of the
Argentine dictatorship, which with unconscious irony dubbed
itself ‘El proceso’ (2):
The Ministry of Special Cases (2007) by Nathan
Englander.

The
difference is not just one of literary theory: Kafka focuses
on the process of destruction and its results (the lives
of Gregor Samsa, Joseph K., the apparatus of the colonial
penitentiary); Joyce, on the beauty of the world that
the forces which dominate Ireland (the British Empire,
the Catholic Church, Irish nationalism) seek to destroy.
He critiques these forces particularly through Stephen
Dedalus, but he ultimately stresses the positive, in the
lives of Leopold and Molly Bloom. Ulysses may not be for
everyone, but its general tone is of optimism and celebration.
It is nearer to Whitman than T. S. Eliot, Giovanni Boccaccio
than Dante, Cervantes than Fyodor Dostoevsky. And this,
to conclude where we began, is what Borges brings out
in his poem ‘James Joyce’:

Between
dawn and night lies universal history.

From
the night I see before my feet the roads where the Hebrew
walked,

Carthage
laid low, Heaven and Hell.

Lord,
give me the courage and joy to scale to the summit of
this day.

Notes

1Carlos Gamerro, Argentine author and
translator, has taught seminars on Joyce and Borges at
the Buenos Aires Latin American Art, has studied and taught
Literature at Buenos Aires University (UBA), and teaches
at present at the Universidad de San Andrés and at the
Museo de arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA).
His publications include the novels Las Islas (Simurg,
1998; Norma, 2007), El sueño del señor juez (Sudamericana,
2000; Página 12, 2005; 27 letras, 2008), El secreto y
las voces (Norma, 2002), La aventura de los bustos de
Eva (Norma, 2004; Belacqua, 2006), the book of short stories
El libro de los afectos raros (Norma, 2005) and the books
of essays El nacimiento de la literatura argentina (Norma,
2006) and Ulises. Claves de lectura (Norma, 2008). He
is at present working on a translation/adaptation of Hamlet
for the stage. .